


Firestarters

by Anonymous



Series: RNM Week 2019 [4]
Category: Roswell New Mexico (TV 2019)
Genre: Multi, early early malex, high school era, rnm week 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-25
Updated: 2019-07-25
Packaged: 2020-07-19 14:49:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19975864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: Bad kids should stick together, Rosa decides.





	Firestarters

Guerin had a lean and hungry look about him these days, like a young wolf.

Rosa thought it suited him. It was a Thursday afternoon and they were the only ones in detention. Guerin sat at his customary desk in the back corner, reading an organic chemistry textbook. According to Liz, he was some kind of prodigy. She sat in the other corner, doodling on a scrap of paper, watching Guerin from the corner of her eye.

Guerin’s offense was per usual—three times late to homeroom. Something was obviously up with that, but the morons who administered Roswell High wouldn’t exert themselves for a hard-faced foster kid who would probably just end up in juvey, anyway. Neither would Rosa, generally speaking, but she and Guerin had been spending a lot of time together in detention recently.

Also, Guerin had gotten hot. Rosa eyed him surreptitiously. He had broad shoulders for a sixteen-year-old, and his arms were nicely toned. Liz said he worked at the scrapyard on weekends. 

He’d caught her looking. He raised his eyebrows. _What?_ Rosa scowled, tossed her hair, and went back to her drawing. It was only four o’clock; still another hour to go, trapped in this stuffy classroom with nobody but Guerin and Mrs. Jimenez for company. A dying fly buzzed dismally at the window. Rosa felt her eyelids getting heavy.

Mrs. Jimenez, the proctor, let out a loud snore. Rosa blinked and looked around. Jimenez was out cold in her chair. Rosa glanced over at Guerin. He was bent over his books; it seemed like he was actually doing his homework. Weird. She got up and made her way over to his corner, sliding into the desk beside his.

“What?” Guerin didn’t look up.

“The old bitch is asleep.”

“Yeah, so?”

“Sooooo you don’t have to keep doing that.” She pulled the heavy textbook away from him and glanced at its cover. “You know you can find all the answers online? There’s like a site where people have posted how to do the problems, not just the odd numbers.” 

“I’m good.” Guerin reclaimed the book.

“So you _are_ a genius then.”

He didn’t reply, just took out his calculator and started plugging numbers into one of the functions. 

“You’re back at the group home, right?”

_That_ got his attention: Guerin’s head whipped around. His hair was truly spectacular, Rosa thought. She’d never seen curls like that on anybody.

“You are, right?”

“…What’s it to you?” he grunted, one shoulder hunching defensively.

“Is that old lady, Mrs. Orban—does she still run the place?” 

“Yeah…?”

“And she had a knee replacement, right?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

“Cállate pendejo—” They both looked over at Mrs. Jimenez, who merely shifted in her chair and emitted another long, whistling snore.

“Why are you asking me all this stuff?” Guerin demanded. Bad-tempered little shit.

“Well, I was at the pharmacy last night, picking up my antipsychotics…” She paused for effect, but Guerin didn’t react. Didn’t ask. Interesting. Even Maria, even _Liz_ , were a little freaked out when she had to go on Zyprexa. The _psychotic_ part of antipsychotic unnerved them, even though they’d said it themselves, plenty of times, both affectionately and apprehensively. _Rosa, you’re acting like a psycho._ “Mrs. Orban was in front of me in the line,” she continued. “She was telling the pharmacist some crap about her knee replacement, and she picked up a prescription for hydrocodone.”

“Okay…” Guerin narrowed his eyes.

“A thirty-day prescription. Twenty milligrams. You know how much those things go for?”

“Nope,” Guerin said.

“A buck a milligram. Hers were twenty milligrams so twenty bucks a pop. Me entiendes, papi?”

“600 bucks.”

“You steal ’em, I’ll give you 200.”

“That’s fuckin’ sketchy, Ortecho,” Guerin said.

She rolled her eyes. “I’m not gonna _swallow_ them, Guerin, I’m just gonna sell them.”

“No, I mean your math is sketchy. If I take those pills, at _great personal risk_ ”—he winked at her—“I want 300. 50-50, mami.”

Rosa crossed her arms. “I don’t negotiate.”

“And I don’t get fucked.” Guerin was full-on smirking now. It was, she had to admit—even as she cursed him out under her breath—a stupidly sexy look on him. And the little shit was right, the stealing _was_ the riskier side of the operation, considering she was just gonna unload the pills on Kate and Jasmine, who’d buy _anything_ , ’cause they were dumb little hoes with money to burn. 

“Okay, 200 and I’ll throw in some weed.” She looked him up and down. “And I’ll let you finger me after detention.”

Guerin grinned. “So romantic, Ortecho. I feel like I’m in a movie. You better try somebody else.”

“So that’s a no?”

“There was a time I might’ve considered selling my ass for a hot meal, but I’m not actually a prostitute,” Guerin said. 

His offhand tone chilled her, but she didn’t want to dwell on the implications of what he’d said. Because then she’d start wishing she’d slipped him something extra all those times he came to the Crashdown and ordered a plain burger, stone-faced as he counted out the change, searching deep in his pocket for nickels and pennies. At the time, she’d just thought he was weird. “Wouldn’t my offer make _me_ the prostitute?” she challenged.

“All right, now we’re just splitting hairs,” Guerin said, smirk hitched back in place. “C’mon Ortecho, we both know how this is gonna go, so cut the shit and go halfsies with me.”

She folded.

  
*

  
They sat cross-legged on her bed as Guerin dumped his haul out between them. “Seconal, Nembutal, Darvon, Xanax, Valium, Restoril, and Vikes,” he announced.

“Holy fuck, man.” 

“Right? The medicine cabinet was packed with expired stuff. Still good, probably…”

School was out for the summer. She’d graduated by the skin of her teeth; Guerin had finished junior year second in his class, nudged out of the top spot by Liz because his accumulated absences and latenesses docked his participation grade or something.

Over the last few months, their little side-hustle had flourished. Rosa had taken to lurking around the pharmacy, keeping her ears open, and whenever somebody walked away with something interesting, she’d tip off Guerin, and he’d relieve them of it. The kid was a natural thief; there wasn’t a house he couldn’t break into. Sometimes he stole _back_ the stuff she sold to Kate Long so they could sell it to Kate’s dumb ass _again._ Guerin said Kate Long and her whole family were racist cabrones and had it coming, and the resale operation compensated for the times he took pity on a prospective target—which happened often enough—and cancelled the heist. For a thief, he had a lot of conscience.

“What’re you gonna do with yours?” she asked, slapping a pile of bills into his palm.

“Buy a truck,” Guerin said. “Got enough now. What about you?”

“Hmmm.” She didn’t touch the stuff he stole, but there were other substances that appealed to her. She thought he might disapprove. They’d only smoked weed together and Rosa doubted if he did anything harder in his spare time. He probably knew what she was up to, though—he was too damn perceptive for his own good. “Saving,” she said vaguely.

“Riiiight, Ortecho. Sure you are.”

So what if he had her number, it wasn’t like she craved the respect of the Michael Guerins of the world. “Wanna chill for a bit?” she said.

They hung out in her room and Guerin bitched about her music and then they started fooling around, which was something they had started doing recently. They made out on her bed and Guerin had his hands under her shirt and then under her bra; he had a really sweet way of saying “This okay?” before he did anything, even if it was something they’d done before. He squeezed her tits and unclipped her bra. She pushed him onto his back and climbed on top of him. She was starting to take his shirt off when he squawked and rolled to the side.

“What?”

He fumbled around her unmade bed and extricated the pill bottle that had stuck him in the spine. “Zyprexa,” he said, and passed it to her without comment.

Rosa tossed the bottle under the bed. “It’s for my bipolar,” she offered, even though he hadn’t asked.

“What’s that?”

“Manic depression?” She raised her eyebrows, and he shook his head. “You know, wild mood swings, reckless behavior, erratic sleep patterns, addictive tendencies, suicidal ideation, too much sex?”

“Oh.” Guerin was very still, his t-shirt hanging around his neck. He frowned up at the ceiling and chewed his lip. Rosa wondered if she’d finally managed to rattle him. But then Guerin said: “D’you think I might have it, too? I’m all those things you just said.”

“Michael…” She rarely called him anything but _Guerin,_ or _papi_ , or _pendejo_.

“I’m always on the verge of some giant disaster,” he said. He was looking at her like he was at confession and she his confessor. “I can barely keep my temper, even though I know bad things happen when I lose control. I love sex and I get a mad rush from stealing all this shit, even though I’m only a hop, skip and a jump away from juvey, and—”

“You saying _I_ don’t worry about that? Guerin, my dad’s an illegal alien—”

“He’s a—” Guerin laughed. And kept laughing, a strange look on his face. “An _illegal alien—_ ”

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Guerin? He could get deported if—” 

“You mean he’s an undocumented immigrant,” Guerin corrected, slightly out of breath. “Your dad’s not an alien, Ortecho. Jesus.” 

“Yeah, I guess?” She didn’t really understand him sometimes.

His expression clouded again. “I’m… pretty fucked up inside,” he told her. “I don’t get why I do the things that I do sometimes. Being bipolar would make it all… well, it would explain me, a little, wouldn’t it?”

She felt a wave of fondness wash over her, followed by a slow, aching sadness. “You’re not bipolar, trust me,” she said, curling up beside him on the bed. “You’ve just had a really shitty life, Michael.”

They lay there for a while without saying anything. In a town like Roswell, there was a shorthand for tumbleweeds like her and Michael— _bad kids. Bad kids_ because they were trouble, because they smoked in bathrooms and sold drugs and defaced public property and had fake IDs and threw the first punch and lit things on fire. Because they did things for reasons nobody understood, least of all themselves. _Bad kids_. Her and Michael.

But they were nothing alike.

A just God would have switched them out at birth, Rosa reflected, put _her_ in the system and Michael in a family. She was a born fuck-up, the product of her mother’s slutting around with Jim Valenti. She’d inherited that same mother’s toxic brain chemistry, so everything she had going for her—a stable home, a loving parent—was wasted on her, because she was an addict who lied to her family and her friends, who pulled crazy stunts when she was manic because those fleeting hours of madness were the only times the world felt exciting and full of promise. Michael had a brilliant mind, he was generous and resilient despite his rough edges, he was a _good person_. He _deserved_ a family, Rosa thought. She wished she could give him hers.

It was making her depressed. She prodded his shoulder. “Yo,” she said. “You still wanna screw, papito?”

“Definitely,” Guerin said.  


*

  
A few days later, Liz found the pills she hadn’t sold yet. Liz told Arturo, and then Rosa had to go to rehab. They stuck in her in a stupid program at a stupid facility in stupid fucking Albuquerque, where she went through the motions and asked God to grant her serenity until she won her freedom. When she got back to Roswell, Federico entered the mix and things got crazy again. She pretended to enroll in an outpatient program at the hospital to get her dad off her back; meanwhile, Federico made sure she still got her stuff. Then Jim Valenti, her biological dad, he intervened, and made her get clean for real. When she re-ascended to the land of the living, it was spring. Liz was nearly done with school. Liz was also going to prom with Kyle Valenti who was her boyfriend, which made Rosa feel some type of way because Kyle was _her_ half-brother, but nobody could know about _that._ Alex Manes was around whenever Kyle wasn’t, decked out in silver jewelry and black nail polish and a glare that could strip paint. “Are you, like, gay now?” Rosa asked him one day, and found herself on the receiving end of one of those withering death-glares. “Yeah, I’m like, gay now,” he snapped. “Cool,” she said, and drifted away to find Maria. Except Maria had started working full-time at her mom’s bar and she was less eager to play accessory to Rosa’s manic escapades these days. So life in Roswell basically sucked balls. And when she bumped into Michael Guerin late one night, he told her he’d won a scholarship to UNM and that he had a crush on a dude.

“You mean you _like_ like him?” she said. 

“Yeah, like I’m attracted to him.” Guerin looked good, rangy and toned, though he still had that underfed look about him. She searched his face for clues, but his profile was inscrutable in the darkness.

“So now you’re gay, too?”

“What do you mean, _too_?” Guerin said, and Rosa had to back-pedal because it wasn’t any of her business, or his, that Alex Manes was _gay, too._

“I don’t, I’m asking if _you’re—_ ”

“Not gay.” Guerin cut her off. “It’s just this one guy. So far.”

“Huh.” Rosa regarded him skeptically. He was so utterly distinctive in his looks, so unlike anyone else she knew. “I guess I just don’t see you with a guy,” she told him frankly.

“Well, I’m not with one,” Guerin replied grumpily.

“You’re just… tú eres tan masculino, m’ijo.”

“That’s not a compliment,” said Guerin, testily. Then his shoulders drooped. “With this guy, though—I dunno, Ortecho, maybe I’m imagining the whole thing. He— _confuses_ me, and I… Hell, maybe I should just stick to girls. I understand girls.”

“Understand girls? _You_?” she scoffed. “Seriously, Guerin, nobody understands girls. I don’t understand girls and I _am_ one.” She’d had some baffling encounters with Queen Bitch Isobel Evans recently, though she had no desire to discuss them with Isobel’s _cousin_ —or whatever Guerin was to the Evans twins. “Girls are unknowable.”

“Least I know what to do with them,” Guerin complained. “The way this guy looks at me…”

“We’re the _bad seeds_ ,” she reminded him, because lovelorn gay Guerin was beginning to get on her nerves. “The dumpster fires. Combustible trash. People are always gonna look at us like we’re the shit they scraped off their—”

“Christ, Ortecho, you need to lighten up,” Guerin said. He even laughed a little, which pissed her off, because this was their _truth_. “Maybe it’s time for you to get the hell out of Roswell,” Guerin suggested. “You got better things to do than hang around this place.”

“Easy for you to say, genius boy, you got a scholarship.”

“I want you long gone when I leave for college,” Guerin said, nudging her shoulder.

“Don’t make fun of me, cabrón.”

“I’m _not_ ,” he said. He wrapped his hand around her arm and she felt x-rayed by the intense way he was staring at her. “C’mon, Rosa. You can do anything. You’re the most resourceful person I know.” 

“Yeah, whatever.” She rolled her eyes; she didn’t hear a lot of superlatives about herself these days. It made her feel weird. “What d’you recommend then?”

He let go of her arm. “I dunno, buy a fucking bus ticket for starters?”

Oh _._ Huh. 

It wasn’t a bad idea, she thought. A spark of his optimism kindled a tiny flame inside her chest.   
  
It wasn’t a bad idea at all.

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading!
> 
> my next piece for Roswell Week is a bit longer and encompasses the prompts for Days 5-7, so I will be back on Day 7 with that story.
> 
> previously: THE LIGHT-YEARS, SATELLITE'S GONE, etc. 
> 
> <333


End file.
